L’esprit de l’escalier
by Nyah
Summary: His mind was both things. The unstoppable force and the immovable object." During the Nevada takeover Eric suddenly regained his memories. How, exactly, did that happen? Chapter 3/3
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** No ownership or affiliation

**Summary:** During the Nevada takeover Eric suddenly regains his lost memories. How, exactly, did that happen?

**Note: **'L'esprit de l'escalier' means 'the spirit of the staircase.' It refers to all the things you think to say, heartfelt sentiments, witty retorts, and poignant reflections, only after you've left the room. There will be two, maybe three parts to this.

**L'esprit de l'escalier**

The man who entered the all night diner was not what Eric had expected. He hadn't thought to meet someone so finely formed. If it had been gods that built him, he was lucky not to have been offered back to them as a due sacrifice of terrible beauty. If it was science, systematic descent with modification, then the billions of drafts that had gone before him, bowing and screwing like marionettes in Charles Darwin's ballet, were well spent.

But it wasn't the shocking aesthetics of the man that Eric hadn't expected. It was the man.

He surveyed the diner quickly, dark eyes flitting from one chrome-bright surface to another. A few of the other tables in the overly polished establishment were occupied by customers slid low on greasy benches, red-rimmed eyes fixated on mugs of coffee that had been stale before it was brewed, or picked, or grown. Even with his utter lack of interest in human eating habits, Eric could tell that many of the customers probably lived on diets as liquid as his own and just as intoxicating.

The man, the Walker, approached Eric's table without hesitation, sliding into the booth opposite the vampire with the grace of a being who has long known that if the body can't be controlled then the rest of the world is certainly out of the question. "Flesh? What an unexpected choice."

The Walker shrugged, nonchalant. "I couldn't order food if I appeared in the spirit. Unless one of the waitresses happened to be a sensitive." That idea seemed to amuse him. One of the creatures in question made her way over to the booth. She was a woman whose skirt showed purpled veins from a past pregnancy. The features of her face were wet and syrupy, threatening as she nodded along to the Walker's order, to slip right off. "That one had enough trouble as is."

"I am not dangerous to you while you are in the spirit," Eric pointed out. He should have scented weakness, should have sniffed apprehension. But the Walker only smelled of human and of _old_. He smelled of the world as it had looked before maps and of the rain that had fallen on trees that were seedlings when Christ died.

"Nor I, you. At least, while you're awake." The Walker sipped water from a glass frosted softly with the leavings of dirty rinse water.

Eric didn't miss his meaning. That the Walker, frail and human as he was, considered himself dangerous to a vampire while in the flesh meant that he was either an idiot or he was telling the truth. The end result was the same for Eric either way.

Eric also hadn't missed the look of recognition that sat behind the Walker's eyes, bowing them with suspicion like the warning pressure from a hidden tumor.

"You have misplaced some memories."

That was certainly one way of looking at it. "Misplaced them in a witch's spell, yes."

"What was lost? How long?"

"About a week." A week and a woman. Two women really, but the dead one counted for much less.

"Do you know what happened during that time?"

Eric studied the man's expression. He would have preferred a cunning smirk to blank guilelessness. But the Walker's face was still. Fickle pupils did not dilate to spill into dark irises, mutinous veins did not throb under dark skin or flutter errantly at a temple. "Yes."

The Walker grinned. "An honest vampire?"

"When it suits me."

"There! You did it again!" The Walker laughed outright, an unwelcome sound in this place of pale, watered-down living. "I've known a lot of honest men, Eric Northman, and most of them are dead. But then, you are too, so it's fitting I suppose."

"Jack Smith," he said with an easy nod. "Though if you've heard of me it will be as Jack Walker." There was a hard glint in the man's eye. Or Genocide Jack. Or Jack the UnMaker. Though, these names were only his when his back was turned.

Now Eric knew two things about him. He wondered what the score was.

He'd sent soft inquiries shivering down the web that was his network of associates and underlings. The set of whispered responses pooled into instructions. After several phone calls, a few bribes, and one absolutely necessary carrier pigeon, Eric had expected to have a meeting with a Walker. Just not _the_ Walker. He said as much to Jack.

"We are not so many or so powerful as we once were." There are always golden ages and they are always in the past. "And I haven't met another in a few centuries who would work with a vampire. So you get me." Eric knew from Jacks grin that he was supposed to consider himself lucky.

He considered himself interested. "Excellent."

"What is it you're so keen to remember, Eric?" The Walker rolled his name around his tongue, testing it against the backs of teeth so stainless they'd never make a decent metaphor.

"A war, a murder, and a woman."

The waitress returned with a bottle of blood and a plate of food that all seemed to be various shades of tan punctuated with a spot or two of yellow. "How did you manage to stay alive all these centuries?" Jack unwrapped a bundle of silverware and fastidiously spread a paper napkin across one knee, creating a mocking illusion of class.

If the Walker was going to make the mistake of assuming Eric was honest on general principle, he didn't feel any need to correct the error. "You will see the memories anyway. Correct?"

"If I succeed." Humans didn't wear their hearts on their sleeves as the deliciously absurd expression suggested. They wore them in the muscles around the eyes, in the twists of mouths, in the sets of jaws.

Jack's face was not dressed for doubt..

"Payment." No words minced or wasted.

Jack paused to eat and to think. He chewed and swallowed, seemingly unconcerned with what he was putting into his body. Perhaps that was a consequence of spending so much time outside of it. "A murder, a war, and a woman. All in one week." He chewed and swallowed. "You've killed many, inevitably, in the centuries you've lived. And a week long war that I've never heard of can't have been so epic that you feel a great need to have trophy memories. So I'm going to assume it's the woman that's the crux of the issue." He drained the glass of water and added in a carefully flat voice, "A human woman."

Eric didn't respond since no question had been asked. He didn't even bother to hope that the Walker would misunderstand how odd the circumstances were. The unMaker had walked across every nation of the world and Walked across countless souls. That a vampire might go to any great lengths for the sake of a human woman must be something like the scent of blood on the wind.

Jack seemed to be weighing the question of payment against a forkful of egg yolk. "A favor," he said. "Repaid in kind."

"Clarify."

"I will do this for you. I will Walk into you while you sleep and free these memories the witch trapped. I will give you back the murder, the war, and the woman. I will do this thing you could not have done yourself. I will alter your life, for good or ill, as you request. And, one day, you will do the same for me."

The Walker extended his hand in a deliberately human gesture of commitment.

A favor. Not something to be traded lightly like ones and zeroes in a bank account. He thought of Sookie, the lover he didn't know if he had loved.

He'd spent a lot of women trying to forget that he couldn't remember her.

At first, he'd thought it was the missing days that weighed around his neck like a lodestone, taunting him with the heaviness of singularity. For a short while he even felt something like remorse for the lifetimes' worth of memories he'd stolen from humans with a glamorous smile and a glamorous will. He felt something like sympathy for the array of lobotomized morons who couldn't manage to begin a tomorrow since they were missing the starting point of a yesterday.

The hole in his memory was anything but. It was two minutes stitched together with impeccable finesse, glossed together so deftly with gossamer thread, that he wouldn't have known the patterns didn't match up if someone hadn't pointed it out. If it hadn't been for the setting, a business meeting to an age-stained bedroom, if it hadn't been for incongruous points in space, he wouldn't have recognized the incongruous points in time.

His memory was a thing of neurons and magic. A reel of film a thousand years in the making. It was a masterpiece, honest, unedited, complete... but for one tiny blip, one cigarette burn that could be blinked over and missed. But did the blink miss a beige shot of a cinderblock hallway or did it miss the moment a point of matter exploded into a universe? Was it nothing or something? Something or everything?

And what about her?

When Sookie had asked him for a favor, he knew the Fates had apologized. Those three relentless ladies who'd spun, woven, cut too soon, and then spun frayed ends to hide the mistake had delivered up Mickey as penitence for the wrong they'd done him. He would get back what was his for the price of a disobedient vampire.

Learning what he had done should have been enough. The what should have supplied the why. But Eric was not in the habit of lying to himself. He had not a clue who he had been under the centuries of cunning that had become indistinguishable from instinct.

The idea that he'd spent time as someone he didn't know ate away at him. The fact that he'd spent it with her, that he'd offered to remain ignorant and powerless to stay with her....

He'd wasted weeks thinking the problem over in his head. When the weeks turned to months it was more correct to call it 'obsessing.' His mind was both things. The unstoppable force and the immovable object.

Pam had grown amused when he stopped showing any particular interest in the parade of flesh that passed eagerly before him at Fangtasia. In truth, he felt a troubling aversion to the myriad women who sought his company. Honey and charcoal and burnt cedar they were, rounded and smooth and sanguine. But his hand raised to banish them all with a flick of his fingers. It was as if his body wanted to retain her memory since his mind had failed utterly to do so.

Pam chuckled in the corner and he turned his hand, inverting his desires to beckon them closer instead, virgin, wife, whore, maiden, mother, crone, one and all. In his own way he was being faithful to his willful little telepath. She'd expect nothing less of him and she did so love to be right.

Pam had grown concerned when he stepped back from vampire plots and intrigues. When he stopped seeking advantages, she stopped laughing. When he stopped seeking secrets, she stopped smiling.

He read every spell in Hallow's library. He arranged conversations with witches, conversations of the pleasant and the not so pleasant kinds.

Pam consulted an advice columnist.

Eric looked for a Walker.

Now he'd found one.

Eric took Jack Walker's hand, clasping fingers that were strong and oh-so-breakable. "Agreed."


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** See part 1

**Note: **Thanks to all who read and especially to those who took the time to comment. I cherished every word. I wrote this chapter entirely from Eric's point of view, decided I didn't like it, and re-wrote it as Jack's, thus the style's a little different etc. The third and final chapter will be Eric again.

**Chapter 2**

The vampire would punctually die at dawn. Jack still had quite a few hours until then and decided he had time for a few previews before the feature presentation.

Fangtasia was a place born out of human guesses at what something vampiric might look like. It reached out to passersby with crimson promises of the strange and powerful. Once vampire buildings had been as arrogant as their owners. Their roofs sat like noses in the air, aloof from the transience that played about their foundations like so many school children.

Though there were bare minutes left in the last hour before Fangtasia closed for the day, there were still bodies wall to wall, investing time and breath and hope in this little crossroads. The remaining minutes were closing minutes, the kind that got pinched between the two hands of a clock, squeezed lifeless by the knowledge that some clocks ran fast and some slow so we might as well all call it a night. Last call minutes for last call lives.

Jack had taken a seat near the back wall and scanned the room for eyes that snagged on him and turned fearfully from yet another vision of something no one else could see. But all the eyes stayed glued to their own business, rushing ahead to catch the bartender's attention and a last drink, fleeing back to might-be lovers who might-be waiting. It was better this way, as much as Jack liked toying with unwitting sensitives, one in this crowd could never keep his mouth shut about a glimpse he'd had of the supernatural. It would make that one the tribal god of the other sheep people, someone to be venerated in corn husk images and the first to be eaten by wolves.

Sooner or later the vampire in charge would hear that his bar was haunted and Jack suspected that it wouldn't take Eric Northman more than a few pinched lifeless minutes to realize the Walker had gone exploring. That would never do. It was infinitely easier to let vampires live in their snow globe lives of omniscient invincibility.

Jack had chosen an already occupied position at a booth, double-parked, since the space afforded the best view of the room. While the original occupant was turned into the table, leaning his pierced and plucked face toward the woman opposite him like he was in danger of falling downhill, Jack sat turned to face the bar. His body sunk into the man's lap so their legs described a right angle. Though Jack's legs, of course, looked insubstantial even next to the spindly denim wrapped lengths of meat and bone. He was like an image of person edited into a photograph. When reality saw the photograph she fell down stunned and, scratching her head, added a wispy watercolor of a man and nodded along with the irrefutable pictorial evidence.

The man straightened up and shook his leg in annoyance like a dog worrying a shoe. As was typical, Jack had unconsciously chosen to sit down on the closest thing to a sensitive in the room. He'd been drawn, like every human being, to the person who had the greatest chance of recognizing him for what he was. If only he had a rolled up newspaper.

No matter, the show was starting now anyway. Eric had been sitting in the center of the room for the last hour. The vampire was the statue of a god recovered from a vanquished empire and smuggled home to a people who didn't know his name. They didn't know what he was but they could all sense his power, the relentless strength of the kind that holds atoms of a thing together against the outward, chaotic rush of the universe.

The vampire bouncer approached Eric and Jack looked at the shape of the souls under their skins. There was a kind of family resemblance there, as if her soul had inherited his cheekbones and the arch of his foot. They were maker and child.

Jack left the corner booth to occupy, instead, the third seat at Eric's table, sitting across from the vampire in the spirit as he'd done in the flesh. Only this time, Eric was not at all surprised to see him, since he couldn't.

The female vampire sniffed a greeting at her maker. It said, _Where have you been? Who have you been?_ "You really mean to go through with this." The female was beautiful. Or aloof, unusual, and regal which amounted to the same thing.

"Yes, Pam."

"She is a _woman_." Pam might have said, "She is _alive_" since that was the chalk line on the playground of eternity that separated the vampires from the humans. But few vampires managed to cultivate or acknowledge a true distaste for the living. Most of them spent time dallying with kids from the wrong side of the tracks.

"You've noticed."

Pam's eyes rolled, fish going belly up put of sheer exasperation. Theirs was an interesting relationship. If Eric Northman was something of a god then Pam was the priestess that didn't mind giving that god an earful when the rainfall came late. "I mean, she is only a woman. There are so many of them."

"This one intrigues me."

Pam snorted. "Does final death intrigue you as well?"

Spare the stake, spoil the child. "I will contact you at dusk tomorrow."

"You plan to do this alone? Walkers are not trustworthy creatures. It's probably here watching us right now."

"I'm sure." Eric grinned, white on white, and gestured right at Jack, or, at the chair in which Jack happened to be sitting. The effect would have been ruined if Jack had chosen to stand but, as is, it looked impressive. Eric had a flair for showmanship. "This is much more what I had in mind. Though I did hope you'd bring a translator."

Pam looked from Eric to Jack and back again and rolled her eyes with her whole body. "I sincerely hope you are talking to an empty chair."

"Jack Walker, Pam." Eric kept it to a one-way introduction since his child couldn't see the person she was supposed to be meeting.

Pam did not find the stunt especially amusing. "You're still doing it."

"If you do not hear from me at dusk, you will know there has been treachery."

"I'll be sure to take the chair into custody." Pam's tone never changed from one of dry as desert disapproval but for an instant her soul seemed to shudder, shrinking away from her skin and its ties to the outside world. Jack leaned forward in his chair. Witnessing a disturbance in a vampire soul was rare indeed. He couldn't help feeling a measure of respect for this Pam whose face remained impassive even as she contemplated the the final death of her maker.

What she thought Jack would do to Eric to bring that about was beyond him. Superstitions about his kind were like rabbits- numerous, varied, and impossible to eradicate. She might think he could open his eyes in Eric's mind and step into the night in the shape of borrowed death. She might think he could snuff out Eric's soul with a little spit and a pinch of his fingers. In the spirit, Jack was less dangerous to the ancient vampire than a breath of wind. Of course, very few winds remained that spoke any of the languages of memories and Jack spoke them all. How many ways were there to say Genocide Jack?

"Master, you should not do this alone."

"I couldn't if I wanted to," Eric replied.

"Where will you go?"

"I've booked a suite at the Hyatt." Jack had already discussed the details of location with Eric. He suspected the vampire knew it would be the work of a few moments for Jack to discover the location of Eric's home once he'd gone Walking but vampires were nothing if not territorial.

"I will make a reservation."

"You've requested tomorrow night off. You have plans to see the witch, I believe."

"She is only a woman." Pam's words were flat but the implications behind them were enough to draw a sharp look from Eric. Only a woman, she'd said. Remember, master, this is how a vampire behaves.

"Take the night off," Eric said, his face melting back into the stony mold. He might attack, he might fall asleep. The danger was in not knowing.

The vampire staff was busy herding the patrons out of the bar. Jack turned his gaze from the maker and child to watch the spectacle of wolves up on hind legs snapping and growling but failing to attack the sheep. The threatening looks and shows of fang did little to oust the fangbangers. They put down roots at the sight of sharp canines, germinating in the dark of this caricature of another world. They pretended at courage and managed only moribund fascination. They tried to wrap themselves in sin and fell short at soot. Sad little chimney sweeps in a city of the dead.

The passing souls were soft and malleable. He thought if he reached out to touch one it might shiver into a new shape, any shape, so long as he directed it. Finding the world too free a container, the souls had streamed here hoping to surrender freedom for a vessel that could not be spilled. He wanted to shake them, his children. That urge hadn't died, it had survived the long years of his life, living through a thousands other little deaths in him.

Suddenly he was tired of them. Tired of their sooty feet that stuck to the floor. Tired of their sniveling worship. Tired of their faces like lumps of starchy vegetables, rotting away on the souls beneath.

The vampires provided a welcome distraction.

Pam had gone off to round up the potato-faced chimney sweeps, to turn them out for the day to stand in the sun with atrophying eyes and pockets full of clipped pennies. In her place was another vampire, this one ebony and ivory but with no heat the match the cold.

Eric had, for the second time that evening, found himself face to face with someone he didn't expect. That it was a vampire, and not another human that had surprised him seemed to do little to appease the Viking. The dark vampire's eyes were fixed in a piercing stare, sighting Eric's head where a smoking hole should be.

Eric sniffed the air and his mouth twitched as if he scented a weakness. "Bill, I must say I'm surprised to see you here. Isn't your usual scene more _domestic_?"

The young vampire had gotten to his feet, all cold anger and helplessness. "You mean to pursue this?"

"This?"

Bill's teeth ground together like the warning cracks before an avalanche. "Sookie."

"Ah. 'Her' would have been more appropriate, don't you think?"

"She does not want to be part of our world."

"Your world," Eric corrected. "For a native English speaker, you have a terrible grasp of pronouns."

"A Walker...." Bill said as if he had no idea what the end of that sentence was and he'd rather not find out.

"Word travels." There was no 'fast' to add since it was the verb that had won Eric's ire.

"Do you care for her?" Bill's voice never climbed to the heights of a question, sprinting, instead, down the hard concrete surface of challenge.

"That's what I intend to find out."

Jack wished he had a tape recorder and the solidity required to push the record button so one day they could play back this scene and wonder why there wasn't a laugh track.

"Of course you cared for her then, Eric. You were afraid of your own shadow and she... she's kind."

Jack thought if he took a Walk into Bill he'd find a veil of crystalized memories dangling about the vampire's soul like a chandelier. He'd remember this woman in pixelated close-ups with all the nastier bits cropped out. He'd remember her in a montage set to a love song and ending in tragedy. Jack had seen it so many times in humans that temptation to glimpse it inside a vampire was almost too great. But if he Walked into a vampire who was awake, in would be the last place he'd end up. And Jack Walker was not ready to _end up_ anywhere just yet.

Bill had paused, his mouth stopped up by caution and ceremony. _Long of tooth and light of years_, Jack thought. "Now, Eric," Bill said in the manner of a man fording a swift river. "Do you care for her now?"

The blond vampire didn't look away but he didn't speak either.

Bill seemed to hear some answer in the silence. "You are dangerous to her."

Eric smiled. "Give her some credit, Bill, she's dangerous to herself."

"She was safe before she became involved in vampire politics."

"You opened that door. I'm only walking through it. Don't worry, I'll make sure to close it behind me since you failed to do so." Eric seemed to be enjoying the battle of words. But Jack heard real anger too.

"You think you can keep her safe, Eric?" Bill said, soft as venom. " I hear your maker still lives. He must be quite the vampire to have lived this long. Possesive probably. Jealous of what's his. What will you do when he calls you? What will you do when you stand between your maker and Sookie and he tells you to hurt her?"

Eric blinked once, a twitch of an eye batting coyly at a thousand irrelevant years of self-control. "That won't happen."

"It happened to me."

Eric paused for a split second. A second too long. "Rest assured, Bill. I am not you."

Bill stood and drew an unnecessary breath. "Don't fool yourself into thinking it was you that she loved."

With that exiting speech, the vampire took his leave.

The human staff was busy sweeping the floor and scrubbing surfaces. Dark and dank were part of the atmosphere, dirty was not. The waitresses-turned-custodians pushed cigarette butts and lost rhinestones into dustbins, sweeping them up alongside bits of lost dignity and discarded selves.

Eric sat, silent, long enough that Jack thought perhaps he'd forgotten there had been a fly on the wall of his conversation. But then Eric grinned, nodded, and addressed the fly. "Room 817, Walker. Don't be late."

##

Time of death 5:48 am. Jack still had an hour or so left until then. He retrieved his body and checked into the Hyatt Regency hotel, purchasing a double room on a human floor down-wind of the vampires. The young woman at the desk who checked him in talked in a voice husky with sleep and promises of things other than sleep. Her acrylic nails were thick and shiny as cockroach wings. Jack didn't bother to see if any of her other attractions fared any better.

As the night's concentration broke and gray seeped in to lay a pale stain over the stars, Jack loosened his joints, coaxing out synovial fluid. He stretched. He hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door knob. It wouldn't do at all for the maid to take out his body with the dirty linens.

Then he got into bed and stepped out of his skin.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: See part 1

**Note:** I can honestly say I've never had more difficulty writing anything. Ever. I know I said in the last part that we would switch back to Eric's perspective. It didn't really write itself that way so we're hopscotching. Also, we're going present tense. Apologies to all my English teachers. Apologies, also, if this comes off less as a style and more as a fever chart. Also, I didn't write 'the end' but, in case your wondering, this is in fact the end.

**Midnight**

The grains of sand shift and slip and slide into place. They trickle relentlessly through his fingers. Bare feet bleeding slides over road maps around a love-made quilt through a piggy-back forest. They pile up, the foundations of the skyline of yesterday, implacably growing skyscrapers flirting with a fault line. Shiver. Shiver. Drop an inch. Settle into the self. Settle around a shotgun shell.

Things can change in an evening. In a moment.

Bricks and beams fall from the lacy holes in the sky. Poorly cut denim upon curdled cream magic upon sun-worshipped skin all skating around the oil-spill black of a bloodied floor. Over all hangs the hint of roots running deep and that barely there smell like the lingering scent of a fairy, newly gone out of the world.

Tumble, stumble, slide. Witches, Weres, and women. A Halloween dream on January nights.

When the last grain falls there is no seam to stitch. Nowhere to rip or hold. The memories have not shrunk like grafted skin. They've joined together like drops of water. A reflecting pool, throwing back the starry sky so that heaven is laid out at his feet.

He tests his broken memory and finds it is, has always been, whole. He stuns himself against its solidity. When he comes to, his head is in his hands and she is on the air. His voice is the first thing to find its way back to the present. "Being here on your bed, smelling your scent, Sookie... I remember everything."

**6:15 am**

The vampire is old. Jack waits until the sun is thoroughly risen over the world to be sure that Eric is thoroughly dead to it.

A sleeping vampire is an open book. It is the easiest thing in the world for Jack to write himself into the pages. Jack amuses himself thinking that the Walk into the vampire's soul should be accompanied by torrents of blood and ash, the landscape should be sown with salt, and the soundtrack should be pipe organed in. Instead, it is like walking into spring.

He Walks along the stepping-stone spine of Eric's spirit. Like dissolving into like. The tug of the soul is great, even from far off. Pulled forward, his feet dig furrows in the ground, cleaving the dust of stars and memories.

The soul of the vampire is a fearsome thing to behold.

The word old is worthless. Bright is irrelevant. But Jack recognizes it, has seen it before, and that might have something to do with everything.

In his own oldest memories, a woman who is his reflection tries to teach Jack the language of souls. But the words are so fine that they slip through the atoms of him, only a handful chancing to glance against a quark or two and stick.

He calls up the few words that remain with him- that remain with the world. To the soul he whispers greeting. He whispers comfort. He whispers a phrase with no meaning except that it is a question.

The soul smiles at the oddity of a chance meeting with a wandering spirit and and invites him to observe its stars.

**11:15 pm**

A moment.

"Your queen is dead, Viking." Victor's voice is just light enough to keep the sentence from sounding entirely like the last words in a televised serial drama before a commercial break. Despite the lightness of tone, Victor's diction is carefully selected for gravity. It is an ill-concealed attempt to conjure absent depth and rise primal loyalty.

Humans and vampires, both, always seem fascinated by his background. _Viking_, they call him. Your _queen_ is dead, _Viking_. As if the anachronism lends greater impact. He wonders what Victor knows about who his people were. Does he know that every captain was a king on his own ship and visiting chieftains were only so many extra sailors?

The scene progresses down the path of destiny, shutting doors as it passes, until it channels itself into the path of a bloodless _coup d'etat_. "Why am I alive, of all the sheriffs?"

Victor lists his qualifications. Eric is being traded like a star athlete. Only, his life is up for grabs in the contract negotiation. His life and the lives of the others. He believes those are called 'signing bonuses.'

They are sitting in Sookie's living room discussing the end of an era. The humans are tense. Victor's gentility competes with their heartbeats. Tip of the hat versus tribal drums. Their spiking blood pressures are a thrumming thrilling baseline.

When Eric smashes Sookie's phone, she clamps down on panic, squashing it between anger and hatred. Her jaw sets and wildness leaks from the whites of her eyes, leaving far too much blue. She will live through this surely- if only she can orchestrate a perfect breakdown of the fight or flight response.

But Bill still threatens and promises and offers to die. "Can you say the same?"

Eric looks past Victor to the fireplace. His mind answers for him, quietly offering up a newly-old memory. Sookie by the fire, ruddy-skinned in the heat, looking at him like he's the only other person in the world.

Bill can kill and die for whomever he likes. He is a free agent.

For Eric there is Fangtasia. There are the vampires under his protection. There is Pam. There is Sookie.

Things can change in a moment.

Eric's going to be sure to make it out alive.

**7 am**

The words of memory fall easily from Jack's lips and the youngest-oldest memories present themselves for inspection, falling like morning stars from the not-quite-sky. These memories are shy and light-sensitive. They don't visit the too-bright soul often, perhaps only when it is, as now, shrouded in dreams.

Jack peers into their depths and sees something perfectly ordinary in every way. He sees the sound of shared heartbeats and the taste of milk yet to come. He floats in an inside sea. When the tide goes out there is confusion. Sounds take on their ordinary sharpness. The world goes from dark to light, a perfectly ordinary labor, a perfectly ordinary tribute to the creation of the world. Yes, Eric's birth is perfectly ordinary in every way. Except that it happened.

The young memories pull each other along before Jack by hooked pinky fingers. They parade before him in perfect formation, showing no unexpected gaps in the line, singing his life in shrill-remembered voices.

Eric watches the world stay the same through changing eyes. It grows with him, a thing to be wrestled like an always older brother.

When the brother dies, wrestled down by another, the world survives. Eric takes his brother's wife. The world steps into his brother's shoes.

**10:30 pm**

He arrives, like the calvary over the hill, swinging into action, maybe turning the tide. He makes quick work of the house, checking all the doors and windows, too distracted to notice that no inch of the house feels at all like a place he's never been before.

"I'm going to get my shotgun."

Practical as a sound wave, inevitable as cause and effect, her words send a ripple through him, stimulating muscles and movement like an electrical impulse. The end result is this: He reaches into the closet and retrieves the gun.

He meets her eyes and finds that she didn't expect lightning to follow thunder or an apple to feel gravity. She's gotten used to the broken order of things.

The fear in her eyes is the first itch of healing.

**10 am**

The memory is colored with the many shades of pain, all of them dark. So dark that for a moment Jack thinks he has found his goal. The tear in the sequence.

His human memories were like beads on the string of time. They were epic moments crystalized with all the repetitive poetry of day-to-day living fitted formlessly into the spaces between.

Fangs draw deeply. They suck hard at the shape of him, removing the parameters. Breath. Warmth. Death.

The life afterwards is un-life. The memories after are mundanely perfect. They hold whole lifetimes in prefect recollection. They recall people and places that the world has forgotten like an eidetic mind's memory of movie credits.

**10pm**

The present catches up with him and shakes him, threatening to snap his neck. Three sheriff's called, three voice mails reached. Sophie Anne LeClerq's personal number is not in his phone's memory, only his. After he makes the call, he'll have to destroy the phone.

After four rings, the queen's voice mail greets him with nothing but a repetition of the number he dialed. Perhaps he won't have to buy a new phone after all.

Eric's mind races ahead, plucking possible aggressors out of the the long line up of dangerous creatures in his memory. In modern warfare, an army's first move is to cut off the enemy's ability to communicate. But his kind cannot afford to take their fights into the mainstream sight of modernity. They are the subjects of kingdoms inside an empire that has never loved kings.

A felled cell phone tower is much more noticeable than a handful of dead undead. So the attackers were working by the old methods. Instead of striking at communications, they struck down the communicators.

Instinct and logic conspire. Go to ground.

But he's been drudging the sinkhole spot of a missing past and the enemy will be a step ahead. When the quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to.

He calls his child and as they speak of countermeasures. He is secure in the knowledge that he can be in two places at once. He totals his worldly assets. Fangtasia is a fortress without walls or a moat. It has Pam. It will have to be enough.

As to the other.... If he goes to ground, his enemies will raze Fangtasia to flush him out. He can't see why they'd regard her any differently. They'll wait for her in the night, lurking in the shadows of her life. This time no one will be there to take the bullet.

**10:30 am**

Eric's old life clings to him for a time like the skin of a snake shed too soon. Jack watches it catch on familiar debris. The mast of a ship. His wife's quick smile. The weight of his son in his arms. It tears at him. All the worse because it is tearing loose and he can finally see what he is underneath.

He despises the new hunger that rides his body. It's not the tooth-grinding void of an empty belly that seems to burst as bubbles of pressure in the ears. Instead it is fullness, fullness of pain that can be only be drown in a bellyful of scarlet.

Jack Walks behind Eric, quick-stepping through time and space. Eric and Occella visit every country on the map. They visit places and thirst after people who have yet to fall under the hard rule of pen and ink. Appius distracts Eric with newness. The Roman lets his child lose himself in flesh and blood and conquest. Then he pulls him back so he can find himself unchanged.

Jack looks on an Eric slick with someone else's blood and someone else's sweat. Someone else's by-products of being alive. That is not for Eric anymore. He will not drip evidence of his vitality out on the world. Vigor will not drain from him like sap from a gauged tree. When he died, he was in the high summer of his life. The summer will last lifetimes. He will never see autumn.

Eric laps up the blood to discover a better version of himself. He laughs at what he had been hiding all along.

**7pm**

Eric contemplates flavors of betrayal. Surely an unfilled promise is less bitter than a stake to the heart. The past few hours have been an exercise in futility. At least he slept through them. He thinks about finding Jack Walker and sewing him up as a scarecrow, the memory of which will live in the minds of his enemies longer than the Walker traversed the Earth.

Jack has failed to change Eric's life but Eric will keep his promise to change Jack's.

In the meantime, Eric has other promises to keep. He reads the time from an electronic display since the thick-paned glass has frosted over the stars. It is another fine night after another wasted day. That a past he cannot remember has a hold on him cannot matter now. He has calls to make.

**11 am**

Jack watches the centuries of Eric's life pass.

Though the vampire's tastes tend toward adventure, slaughter and sex, he is not barbaric in his pursuits. He had been a man who had never relinquished a child's wholeheartedly foolish commitment to living. Death hadn't be able to change that. His life refuses to round out. It won't follow an elliptical path to an inevitable end. It never flickers like candle flame. When he burns through the fuel of one where-when there is always more to follow.

The Walker watches for a snag, a glitch in the procession of wars and women. A meet-cute for the history books. He pages through memories of gore and girls. He flips so fast he almost misses her. She begins before he notices. Before either of them notice.

Eric has an insatiable appetite for the unfamiliar. The mild interest that colors his first memories of Sookie Stackhouse is an unremarkable, muddled color on the palette of his life like a confused mix between an attractive woman and a new food group.

Jack watches her collect adjectives. Useful. Stubborn. Desirable. Frustrating. Naïve. Brave. Foolish. Confident... Jack half expects her to turn about and spit in the vampire's eyes just so he'll stop describing her.

Except that would be _rude_.

Jack watches him want her. He always wants them. He may be best at pride but lust is his sin of choice. He likes to convince them that they want to give him what they don't want him to have. Her attraction is in the things he can take from her. Her rare modesty and far rarer loyalty. Her poverty. Her innocence. He doesn't want to meditate on her being, he doesn't want to feel anything for her. He wants to shatter her and he wants her to want him to do it.

The memories slip and flow under Jack's voice.

Sookie offers only the Other Things to Eric. She bargains with her time and her telepathy, holding the gifts out on flat palms, hoping he will take them without touching her.

When change comes about, Eric is vexed that is not the one to cause it. She trusts Eric a little more only because she loves Bill a little less. Eric is amused by his own annoyance. If he has grown invested, the fault must lie with her.

Eric enters a window and sees her with a Were. The Were is like her, hot-blooded and burnt brown from the sun. He witnesses their easy exchanges of troubled glances and loud whispers. He imagines them moving in concert, moving a body, through a drudged up memory of daylight.

The memory is tinged, ever so faintly, with envy.

Jack wonders what it is about Sookie and the Were that gives Eric pause. Is this the inevitable moment when he realizes she has a whole other life that has nothing to do with him? Does he see that her lips part differently, smile just as easily, with someone else? Does he see that she, around him, is what he makes her? Is this the first time he wants her to be free?

But this is not the hour in which things change.

Jack watches a stake slide into Sookie's side, brutally cleaving not-yet-dead flesh. Her blood on the floor pulls at Eric so strongly that Jack almost expects the memory to rewrite itself so that he might lap up the erotically pooling life. When Eric catches her eye, he can see that she expects him to do it. It. He will drain her dry on the club floor or leave her behind to be torn to shreds.

Two roads diverge in a bloody wood.

Instead Eric defies her, he becomes someone she doesn't expect. He carries her from the club. He holds her close in all her gory glory. When it is time to remove the stake, she will concede only to give him only the smallest fraction of her pain. Red-gripped half- moon fingernail marks.

She screams and screams and then looks into his eyes. The world shrinks down the wrong end of a telescope, collapsing into a tiny seed of what they were ready to explode into are. In that moment, that single point of potential, things teeter on the edge of change. Like so many things, what they might be is born in the stench of blood and pain.

He sees things he never saw before. Simple things. He sees that her hair is the color of corn and curls at the ends. He sees that her hands are strong enough to mark him. He sees that she has things he cannot take. Perhaps most importantly, he sees that she sees too. She sees that trusting him more has nothing to do with loving Bill a little less. She knows that she can no longer offer pieces of herself on flattened palms because what they were has grown small now and he'll accept nothing less than all of her.

There are no new adjectives to add but everything is different. The history of their two races second guesses itself. The rules for what they can be to each other become unclear. The new knowledge burns into them cleanly, settling, a stake-shaped hole in who they thought they were.

Things can change in a moment. But that doesn't mean they change forever.

She sleeps. When she wakes the instant is long passed. The instant that did not equal infinity.

Jack watches them carry on as before. They desire and despise. They rescue Bill who is loved a little less. They drive through a convenience store hold up and two fools with silver nets. They laugh. The stake-shaped hole heals. He carries on. So does she.

When Jack finds the mistake it only because he has learned the rhythm of Eric's life well enough to miss the single, dropped beat. The spell left no footprints, it caused no ripples, its reflection is nowhere to be seen in all the mirrors of memory. Jack talks apart two fused memories, two tiny moments had been told they were twins. That they look nothing alike has escaped their attention.

With the feel of the jagged edges of the not-twins memories as his guide, Jack seeks what is left of the spell. He finds it cast adrift from the soul like a discarded satellite, crumpled and shining like a battered paper crane. He speaks to the memories trapped inside, standing forlornly on a bridge to nowhere. The milling wasps of memory hear him and sting, tearing the crumpled crane, helping it to evolve from clumsily folded paper to delicately chewed lace.

He makes their acquaintance as they trickle forth, orphaned memories of a thousand-year old mind. He tells them of a barely-there snag. He wonders if they'll sting open a stake-shaped hole.

**6:15 pm**

He has little to tell Pam when he calls except that everything is as it was. The world is the same one he closed his eyes upon. He is still in it.

**Noon**

The memories fall into place messily. They fall between the curved lines of a parentheses. Jack wonders if this is what Eric was really looking for. Things do not begin inside parentheses.

**6pm **

The sun sets. Eric wakes. The Walker is gone.


End file.
